Azed: a giant among crosswords

This week the Observer prints the 2,000th Azed crossword to be set by Jonathan Crowther. Francis Wheen, Michael Frayn and Colin Dexter, all of whom regularly attempt to solve Azed's crosswords, reveal what makes them so special

Francis Wheen

Who, apart from the Queen, can say that they are still doing exactly the job they did 40-odd years ago? Step forward, Jonathan Crowther, better known as Azed, whose 2,000th puzzle is published today. When the first crossword in his unbroken weekly sequence appeared in these pages, in March 1972, our present prime minister was five years old.

If you leaf through old Observers you won't find much else that looks familiar. Our then prime minister, Edward Heath, had declared a state of emergency the previous month because of a miners' strike. Parliament was voting to join the Common Market; President Nixon was visiting Chairman Mao. A few weeks later burglars were caught in a building called Watergate and Reginald Maudling resigned as home secretary over the Poulson scandal. Oh, and Ted Heath was trying to persuade Vic Feather to accept a £2 limit on pay rises. That's how long ago it was: the TUC general secretary was a household name.

Does anything survive of this strange landscape? Turn to the Azed page. For the very first of Crowther's monthly clue-writing competitions, in March 1972, the names of NC Dexter, CJ Morse and DF Manley all appeared among the "highly commended" entrants. In the Azed competition for August 2010, Colin Dexter, Sir Jeremy Morse and Don Manley could still be found among the winners or VHCs.

Their success redounds to Jonathan Crowther's credit. He is like the best sort of schoolteacher, inspiring you to produce great work because you so want to please him. His grids alone are feats of engineering of which IK Brunel would be proud; and his clues are works of art. The quality of the monthly entries from Dexter, Morse and Manley – and scores of others, even also-rans such as me – reflects the standards he himself has set, and still maintains. Here, to choose a recent example at random, is one of Jonathan's clues from 5 September: "What chronicler keeps pens?" Answer: clerk. This is what's known as an "&lit", in which the whole clue is simultaneously both the definition and also the cryptic indication (because the letters cler-k are "penned" by the words "chronicler keeps"). It's classically elegant and graceful, the work of a man whose imagination is as fresh and unjaded as ever.

For his last "milestone" puzzle, No 1,750, Jonathan chose the theme of Gray's elegy, presumably because it was published in the year 1750. No one could accuse his crosswords of blushing unseen – not even when they were exiled to a distant outpost in the travel section for a few years – but the poem was more fitting than he knew: "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,/Their sober wishes never learned to stray,/Along the cool sequester'd vale of life/They kept the noiseless tenor of their way." Elsewhere in the Observer the madding crowd strives away like billy-o, just as it did in the days of Richard Nixon and Reginald Maudling, but for those needing a refuge from the weekly din there's still the cool sequester'd vale inhabited by Azed.

A line from the epitaph in Gray's elegy seems pretty apt, too: "Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere." Jonathan's achievement in teasing and tormenting and delighting us for so many years deserves rather more than the passing tribute of a sigh. Why Her Majesty hasn't made him a Knight of the Garter is a mystery that not even Colin Dexter can solve. As Sergeant Bilko used to say: in France they'd name a park after him.

Michael Frayn

I suffered a bit of a shock to my moral universe some years back in the Palm House at Kew, when I read the sign on the banana palm and discovered that bananas, which I had been guiltily enjoying all my life as junk food, were in fact highly nutritious. I had another shock more recently when I read in the papers that my weakness for the odd square of dark chocolate was not shortening my life but prolonging it. And yet another upset when I read somewhere else the good news about crosswords. I had always assumed that my addiction to settling down with the Azed crossword after tea on Sunday, if I got half a chance, was another slightly shameful self-indulgence – something to be concealed from my friends and suppressed whenever possible in favour of bracing walks and serious reading. But not at all, it turns out. Crosswords are good for you, and better and better for you the longer the bananas and dark chocolate keep you alive, because they help to ward off senility.

I've been taking the Observer's anti-senility pills, as I now discover they are, ever since I was a child. I began by doing the Everyman crossword with my father. Sometimes, as a special treat, he would turn over the page of the paper and we would gaze respectfully together at the unapproachable intellectual heights of what was then signed "Torquemada", in the way that two simple ramblers might look at the Matterhorn without ever aspiring to climb it. By the time I was old enough to try it, Torquemada had been replaced by Ximenes; and I have to confess that when Jonathan Crowther took over in 1972, under the name "Azed", it took me a distressingly long time to realise that the "A" was not short, as in "as", and that Azed was not an inquisitor like his two predecessors – possibly of Moorish descent. (It has taken me an even longer time to discover that, as well as being A-Z, he is another inquisitor, or rather the anagram of one: Deza. I should have guessed that even in his name there was buried treasure.)

Taken from the introduction to Chambers Book of Azed Crosswords, 2005

Colin Dexter

The Observer's crossword has exerted a powerful influence over my life for almost six decades. My relationship with it began in the early 1950s, when I was at Cambridge and I used to look at the Ximenes crossword, the Azed's predecessor, every week and I would be completely lost. I could never get any of the clues. I became quite fanatical and gradually improved, progressing to the stage where I could enter the monthly competition. As I scanned the list of winners I noticed there were a couple of names that used to appear quite regularly: CJ Morse and Mrs B Lewis.

Over the intervening years, Sir Christopher Jeremy Morse, former chairman of Lloyds bank, former chancellor of the University of Bristol and a fellow of All Souls, became a close friend. So too did "Mrs B Lewis", who was in reality the late Dorothy Taylor, compiler of the Observer's Everyman crossword; she used the pseudonym, which was the maiden name of her sister-in-law, to enter the Azed competitions for which she was not strictly eligible. But at the time they were both distant heroes.

I didn't actually meet Jeremy until the early 1960s when I was pruning my front garden in Oxford. He appeared over the top of the hedge and said: "Your name has been appearing in the list of Ximenes winners almost as regularly as mine, so I thought we'd better get acquainted." We've been friends ever since, sharing a deep love of the classics as well as an abiding passion for crosswords.

When I came to write my first Inspector Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, it seemed only natural to choose Morse and Lewis, two names that had become such a big presence in my life, as the names for the two key figures. In fact, every character in that book was named after regular entrants in Observer crossword competitions and crossword compilers, except the murderer.

If people ask me why I chose Jeremy's name for Morse, I answer truthfully that it was because he was the cleverest man I had ever met and I intended Morse also to be fiendishly clever. Unlike both of them, I'm not really a very clever person and if I have had any success in life it is because I have tried and continue to try very hard indeed. Especially at crosswords.